That's Lillian van Hartesveldt with Julie on the previous
page. I took the photo at MagiCon in 1992.

I
wasn't able to attend DC Comics' memorial service for Julie,
held in New York short days after his death. But my oldest friend
in comics fandom was there. I told my story
of the accident of July 9, 1966 in Challenger
#5.

JULIE SCHWARTZ:
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE

Mike Friedrich

On a snowy New York March 18, 2004, approximately
200 comics professionals and fans met to remember a man who had
touched their careers and inner fantasies for 60 years.

A few attendees like Irwin Hasen, Joe Kubert,
Murphy Anderson, and Irwin Donenfeld had known Julie from the
Forties. Others like Brian Tomsen had met him in his retirement
in the Nineties. Neil Gaiman delivered the remarks of his contemporary
Alan Moore, who'd first met Julie during his final professional
decade of the Eighties. The largest contingent was those who
had encountered him as fans, free-lancers and fellow staffers
from the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Perhaps because this last group was my
own cohort I paid the most attention to the speakers from them:
Denny O'Neil, Mike Uslan, Jack C. Harris, Len Wein [delivered
by Bob Greenberger], Guy H. Lillian III [delivered by Harris],
Anthony Tollin and Paul Levitz. O'Neil noted the affinity Julie
had for double-identity characters, as one who kept his professional
and personal lives very separate. Uslan spoke for his fellow
baby-boomer fans who thought of Julie as a series of magic numbers
denoting turning-point issues in the development of what came
to be called DC's Silver Age. Wein described how Julie "taught
me plot structure and ingenuity and the persistence to keep at
a story until it was right, until it was ready, until it was
done". Levitz twisted O'Neil's comments inside out by noting
that Julie had taught him "to marry the prettiest girl in
the office", alluding to the famous red hair of Jean Schwartz
as well has Levitz's own wife Jeanette.

Perhaps the most satisfying moment of the
event personally was discovering that my own life-long pen-pal,
Irene Vartanoff, had come up from Maryland to attend. She and
Guy Lillian were "introduced" to me by Julie through
his letter columns around 1965 and I've stayed in touch with
both of them through correspondence and very occasional visits
ever since. It was Guy who first called me within hours to let
me know of Julie's passing. Seeing Irene completed a circuit.

Although I'm barely a footnote in Julie's
career, as the first [1967] of the baby-boomer writers he hired,
in the life story where I'm the star, Julie was the one who published
50 teen comments of mine in his lettercols and then gave me my
first job.

My letter-writing began around the time
the "new look" Batman was introduced, though
I'd been a fan of Julie's for two or three years before then.
A couple of years later it turned into a bit of correspondence
as Julie began to send short replies.

As I grew during high school my comments
began to contain suggestions for how stories could have been
improved. As I neared my summer vacation in 1966 I off-handedly
wrote asking if I could try writing a script. Julie quickly affirmatively
replied and just as quickly rejected my first effort, an Elongated
Man story.

Not long after this, by coincidence Julie
and his wife were taking a vacation to San Francisco. Guy Lillian
and I arranged to come in from our suburban homes to see him
together. Unfortunately we had a near-tragic auto accident on
the way and wound up at the hospital instead of his hotel.

Undeterred I continued to submit ideas
and scripts, and the following spring [May 10, 1967] he bought
my first one, a Robin, Boy Wonder story that eventually saw print
in Batman #202.

As I was graduating from high school the
following month, I took the script payment [$10/page] and used
it to go to New York for the summer before entering college.

I finally met Julie by showing up on the
day that DC conducted tours [I wasn't old enough to know about
making appointments] and then once in the office introducing
myself. He was as many have described, a straight-laced formal
guy with a white shirt and tie. My wardrobe was t-shirts and
jeans. Despite this generation gap, he was straightforward, friendly,
and amazingly tolerant.

That first summer he worked with me on
a handful of scripts, including the one that was first to be
published, Spectre #3, drawn by Neal Adams.
I can't think of a better way to start a multi-decade career.

Nolacon II's "Other Forms" Hugo
was a precursor of today's "Related Book" category
- and here's the winner of that award, talking about the man
who helped inspire Watchmen.

FOR JULIE SCHWARTZ

Alan Moore

Just off the 'plane from England, anything except fresh out of Kennedy,
within an hour or two we'd all been introduced to Julie, all
us early eighties economic migrants, awestruck, wide-eyed, staring
like religiously-converted lemurs as at last we met our childhood's
god, the intergalactic cabby who wouldn't shut up, the curator
of the space museum.

We loved Julie in the way that we'd love
anyone we'd known since we were small, who'd shared with us that
secret, rustling, flashlight-dazzled space beneath the midnight
counterpane. We loved him in the way that we loved covers with
gorillas on. We followed at his heels, a quacking flock, along
the migraine-yellow dot-toned hallways at the DC offices, and
if he thought of us as irritating Carl Barks nephews, as the
Hueys, Deweys and Louies that he's never really wanted, then
he didn't let it show.

Quite the reverse. Julie indulged us like
a visiting school-trip for pale, consumptive English orphans,
fragile coughing invalids at Fresh Air Camp. He sneaked us presents,
file copies of some treasured Mystery in Space
pulled from the morgue drawers in his office, from which rose
the perfume of his life, long decades of pulp pages, fifty thousand
comic racks in every corner magazine store that you ever visited
or dreamed about. He knew a captive audience when he saw one,
and appreciated our appreciation. All the anecdotes were new
to us, the creaking chair-bound jokes fresh as this morning's
lox. The funeral for a much-feared fellow editor he told us of,
whereat the section of the service set aside for testaments and
kindly words concerning the deceased stretched into long, embarrassed
silence until someone at the back stood up and ventured the opinion
that the late lamented's brother had been worse.

We were a pushover. He made us laugh, he
knocked us dead, and then there was the scrapbook, with its pages
full of letters, pictures, signatures. "I am, sir, your
devoted servant, H.P. Lovecraft." Photographs of Julie,
young with diamond cutter eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles.
Men in dark coats and Homburg hats on winter corners in New York,
grey vapour twisting up from manhole covers, from cigars. "You
see the crewcut kid, the newsboy there? That's Bradbury."
We'd gape and nod, could not have possibly been more impressed
if he'd said, "See that old guy in the toga, standing by
Ed Hamilton? That's Zeus."

And now we hear that Julie has been...discontinued?
Cancelled? But they said the same about Green Lantern and the
Flash back in the early 'fifties, so we can't be certain. This
is comics. There'll be some way around it, be some parallel world
Earth-Four Julie, born thirty years later to account for problems
in the continuity, and decked out in a jazzier, more streamlined
outfit. A funny, brilliant, endlessly enthusiastic twelve year
old got up in an old man suit, Julie spent his life mining the
gold-seam of the future; is too big, then, to be ever truly swallowed
by the past. He was a friend, he was an inspiration, was the
founder of our dreams.

He ruined my reputation as a gentle pacifist
by claiming that I'd seized him by the throat and sworn to kill
him if he didn't let me write his final episodes of Superman,
and how, now, am I supposed to contradict a classic Julius Schwartz
yarn? So, all right: it's true. I picked him up and shook him
like a British nanny, and I hope wherever he is now, he's satisfied
by this shamefaced confession. Goodnight, Julie. It has been
our privilege to have known you. You were the best.